Common Fastboot Commands You Should Know And Their Uses

Recently, I published a post on Google USB & ADB driver installation for Google android devices. For fastboot to work, you must have downloaded and installed Google USB driver for your android phone or tablet. In the rest of this post, I'll be talking about the common fastboot commands that you normally would need and they are used.

1. Flashing Recovery Fastboot Command

This command is used to flash custom recovery image into android device using the fast boot command below.

Fastboot Flash Recovery Recovery.img

The last word in the command above "Recovery.img" would be the name of the recovery you are flashing, e.g if I named my recover Galaxyrecovery.img the the command would go like this:

Fastboot Flash Recovery Galaxyrecovery.img

2. Unlocking Bootloader Fastboot Command

This command unlocks the boot loader of any android device, but note that you must have received the boot loader unlock file from the device manufacturer before this can be done. If you have gotten the file already, move it to this location  C:\Android\platform-tools. Then run the command below:

Fastboot OEM Unlock

3. Flashing Boot & System Fastboot Command

On some HTC android phones, you would need to flash the boot.img file of any custom ROM you install if you want the phone to boot up. Getting the boot.img file of the custom rom is easy, just extract the custom ROM zip file with 7zip or Winrar software and copy the boot.img file from the system folder to this directory on your computer: C:\Android\platform-tools. Now run the command below.

Fastboot Flash Boot boot.img

4. Changing Directory In Fastboot

To use fast boot, of course you will need to use the command window and navigate to the location where fastboot.exe is saved. if your computer runs Windows 7 or Windows 8, there is a shortcut to make the command window navigate directly to fastboot location. How? just open "my computer" and goto C:\Android\platform-tools. Hold down the shift key on your keyboard and right click on your mouse. You should see "Open command window here" from the pop-up. Click it and command window will open and automatically navigate to that location.

But if you use Windows XP or earler versions of windows that doesn't have that feature, then you would have to do it manually by clicking on Start, click run, type cmd in the text box and hit enter. Now use the command below to navigate to any directory on your computer.

cd C:\Android

The command above will navigate fastboot to the android folder under C drive, if you are navigating to another location, you should know what to add.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If there is something you would like to add, please do so in the comment section below.